It’s hard not to do a deep dive into a past life when friends send you cards, videos, and memorabilia from old adventures. I’ve been reliving so many of these lives this year that it has brought a real vivaciousness to what can sometimes be old and stale memories.

A wellspring that keeps on giving is my Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike in 2006. When anyone asks what my favorite trail is, it’s hard to keep from gushing all over the PCT that year. And I say THAT YEAR. Every year on a long trail can have an entirely different vibe and flavor. Much of that can be determined by the weather, and the specific hazards of that year, but for me it almost always comes down to the people. 

The people in 2006 are what made the trail so special for me, and judging by the number of folks I’m still connected to from that hike 19 years ago, I was not alone in basking in the afterglow of humanity we met that year. We were bonded by something that year. It could have been record level snows in the Sierra that forced us to hike in groups and look out for each other at hazard points. It could be that we were hiking before GPS and smartphones, so again, had to dig deep, read the terrain, and help those who weren’t as familiar with navigation (Note: that was me! I learned so much from my fellow hikers about reading maps and terrain that year…and I’m a much different hiker for it!). It could have been the fire that closed the Canadian border to us until right at the end when it opened again. It could have been so many things.

So, you might indulge me in this blog post because I’m going to go deep. What was it like to hike 2,663 miles from the Mexican to the Canadian border? 

This photo will help kick us off:

How about some backstory?

My real initiation into the thru-hiking life began four years prior when I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2002 (another story for another day). Suffice to say, I was hooking on the walk all day everyday thing, and knew that I wanted to keep my nomadic nature alive in the future, but wasn’t sure how or when.

After the Appalachian Trail, I had committed myself to figuring out the whole career thing. Shortly after finishing the AT and returning home to my parent’s house in Peoria, Illinois, I found myself stitching together a series of jobs to make ends meet. I made coffee drinks and slung pastries at Panera and was a cashier at Kohls, I can’t even remember the other odd jobs I had during those months at home, but they were the kind of jobs where I would occasionally run into old classmates from Dunlap High School or Bradley Univerisity and try to decide if I would hide and try to escape notice, or embrace it and tell them my story. That I was working there because I was between adventures (having just finished two years in the Peace Corps and a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail), as a way of explaining why I was buttering their bagel, but it really served to push me to figure out the next thing. No offense to buttered bagels. Love them. 

I was an english major and graphic design minor in college, and LOVED design and information. Information design. I wasn’t quite sure what that could or would look like, but I knew I wasn’t interested in the traditional career options of advertising or PR like many of my Bradley classmates. I wanted something different, something that made a difference in the world, something exciting. 

During the months at home, I was scouring the internet for internship ideas and hit on one in Washington DC at the Smithsonian. They needed an exhibition design intern for the National Portrait Gallery. Interestingly enough, I had been thinking a lot about exhibition design as a career choice. As an exhibition designer I would be concerned with how a person would interact with a three-dimensional space, how I could tell a story or relay information within that three-dimensional space that would inspire, educate, inform, excite, etc., so I applied to the internship and promptly continued buttering bagels. I mean, the chances of landing an unpaid dream-gig like that halfway across the country seemed like a pipe dream. 

Nothing much was happening in the way of job prospects that winter, so I made plans with my AT hiking buddy, Cindy, to move out to Portland Oregon, and try life out there. I knew that I wanted to hike the Pacific Crest Trail and I figured at least moving out west would bring that step a bit closer. I would have to get a job for a while to save up money and establish myself, but Portland seemed like a solid decision. 

Come January 2003, I was two weeks away from my Portland move when I got a piece of mail from the National Portrait Gallery. I got the internship!!!

My first I thought no way, too late. I already had my plane ticket to Portland, I had a place to stay until I could find a long-term rental and there were just too many things in motion to pick up and change directions so suddenly.

Then I woke up. I mean, come on!! Miss this opportunity??? No way. I changed plans, accepted the position, and threw my future into the wind. I was moving to DC, baby!

Fortunately, I had a number of friends from the Peace Corps who lived in DC, and I was able to couch hop for a while until I found a room to rent up on Wisconsin Avenue by American Univesity. And what a room! For the tidy sum of $525 a month, I had a walk-through room in a big group house. A walk-through meant my roommate had to walk through my room to get to hers. This whole set-up was very college-ageish temporary. I had a mattress on the floor, no furniture, and no privacy. It was all good. My internship was 30-hours a week, and I had to get a job so I could afford to live there, so I worked approximately 30 hours a week at Armond’s Pizza around the corner…I was barely there anyway. BUT my housemates were all pretty rad. They were a very diverse bunch, one worked for the Fullbright program, several were in grad school, and several I just can’t even remember. We lived in a pretty nice neighborhood up on Wisconsin Avenue, and I got to know the surrounding neighborhoods really well as I walked and walked and walked them. If you didn’t know, I like to walk, and one of the the best ways to get to know a new city (especially if you are a broke 20-something) is to walk everywhere, and I did.

For work every day I would hop in the metro and take the train down to the middle of DC. I was officially the exhibition design and production intern and an intern at Center for Electronic Research & Outreach Services at the National Portrait Gallery. The two teams split my time in half. And for all of you who vaguely know that the Smithsonian is a big museum in DC, it’s actually a collection of big museums in DC. 

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, with 21 museums, 14 education and research centers, and the National Zoo. I was going to be working at just one of the museums, and it didn’t even have a physical space while I was there.

The National Portrait Gallery had recently decided to relocate to the old Patient office. The building was undergoing renovations (I got to take several tours of the gutted building while I was there; one of the big to-dos happened when they found some civil-war era graffiti on the wall from when the building served as a hospital for wounded civil-war soldiers. That’s pretty cool!)

The National Portrait Gallery was going to share the space with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and it was all a very exciting time; the museum directors were in the middle of re-thinking and re-imagining what these museums would look like. Think about one exhibit that might be shown there: perhaps a permanent collection like the Hall of Presidents. I got to sit in on conversations that discussed things like: Would we hang their portraits at eye level with the public, which would make for a much more humanizing view into the leaders of our country? Or should they be hung up where we had to look up to them, venerate them, celebrate them? What kind of objects would we place next to their portraits? What colors would we use? How much and what information would be on each label next to each piece of art? These decisions were far beyond my intern position, but it was endlessly fascinating to think about…and these were questions that would be at the center of each exhibition that I would be involved with. It was so exciting!

And here you thought you’d be learning more about my Pacific Crest Trail hike, it just goes to show you where 3am brain goes! (BTW, I had a WONDERFUL night of sleep last night. I almost got in a solid 6 hours! #winning, so I think I’m firing on all cylinders today…or most of them anyway)

My main point of contact for the exhibition position was Caroline. And Caroline was amazing. She was the museum’s graphic designer and was in charge of all things graphics for the museum. She really took me under her wing and made sure my internship was so much more than hanging one exhibit while I was there. We took tours of all the museums, often to the collection areas where a vast array of objects never get displayed to the public. Check this out:

The Smithsonian Institution—the world’s largest museum and research complex—includes 19 museums and galleries and the National Zoological Park. Currently, the total number of artifacts, works of art and natural science specimens in the Smithsonian’s collections is approximately 155 million. The bulk of this material—more than 145.8 million specimens and objects—is part of the National Museum of Natural History. In addition, Smithsonian collections include 162,000 cubic feet of archival material and 2.1 million library volumes.

Among the vast collections are irreplaceable national icons, examples of everyday life and scientific material vital to the study of the world’s scientific and cultural heritage. The objects in Smithsonian collections range from insects and meteorites to locomotives and spacecraft. The scope is staggering—from a magnificent collection of ancient Chinese bronzes to the Star-Spangled Banner; from a 3.5 billion-year-old fossil to the space shuttle Discovery; from the ruby slippers featured in The Wizard of Oz to presidential paintings and memorabilia. Collection items vary in size, from the Concorde at 202 feet to the Fairfly wasp at .0067 of an inch. The largest single collection is Natural History’s invertebrate zoology collection with more than 49.8 million specimens, ranging from corals and vent worms to parasites and squid.

Only a small portion of the Smithsonian’s collections (estimated at less than 1%) is on display in the museums at any given time. Many collections are acquired and solely used for research purposes utilized by scientists and scholars from all over the world. Whether they are acquired from the depths of the oceans, tropical rainforests, archaeological sites, everyday life, or even extra-terrestrially, Smithsonian collections are preserved and maintained for public exhibition, education, and study.

And I nerded out on all of it. Moving to DC was one of the best decisions I made during this time of my life, and working at the Smithsonian helped me decide to apply to grad school in museum exhibition design. DC helped me go all in on information design. 

So what did I do for my internship? Well, because we didn’t have a physical museum to work in, Caroline and the curators worked on getting a temporary gallery space to hang A Portrait of the Art World exhibit. We exhibited at the S. Dillon Ripley Center which was notable for the underground building’s copper-domed entrance between the “Castle” and the Freer Gallery of the National Museum of Asian Art. The Ripley Center also connects to the African Art Museum and the Sackler Gallery of the National Museum of Asian Art.

The exhibition consisted of 100 original vintage prints of photographs reproduced in the ARTnews magazine since it began publication as Hyde’s Weekly Art News in 1902. Included were portraits of both European and American artists by a cross-section of such noted photographers as Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Alice Boughton, Hans Namuth, and Richard Avedon. 

I worked with Caroline and the other exhibition designers on the show, as they decided on colors, labels, label content, label style, label fonts, brochures, exhibition signage, exhibition press, and one of my favorite parts of the job, directing the museum’s cabinet maker in making stands, cases, walls, and pretty much any kind of furniture or display element that would be used in the show. 

I got to spend hours with David in his cabinet shop, and I loved it. This guy could make anything. He had an amazing array of skills and tools and could take Caroline and the other’s vision for a display case and make it come alive. David also initiated me into the world of packing and unpacking the priceless works of art. I told you that each museum has an extensive collection of objects, and the exhibits throughout the year will pull from these collections to tell the story the curators decide to tell for each show. This means extensive and impressive systems for storing and preserving the art. Because we were a portrait gallery, there were thousands and thousands of portraits in collections, and each one of those portraits had to be packed and crated (and uncrated) when it was time to hang a show. One day David gave me a power drill and instructed me to open a Roy Lichtenstein painting. Oh boy, my hands shook, and I gladly handed over the drill once I got the first few screws out. I didn’t want to be responsible for a slight slip of the hand that could have massive implications for the painting. 

I felt like I was operating on a different level the whole time I was in DC. I was doing it. I was there. This was exciting and important. 

One of the fun projects Caroline had me working on was to come up with a series of swag that could be sold in gift shops that would commemorate some of the paintings from the ArtNews exhibition. Now in the real world these swag items had been designed and put into production months and months ago. For example, in the Smithsonian gift shop, you might be able to buy a silk scarf that carries a motif from one of the paintings on display in the exhibition. Just coming up with the design is one thing, then a vendor and production facility would have to be found, a display created, and just like the show was a curated affair, so is the gift shop. Each exhibition has a carefully selected set of note cards, gift items, memorabilia, and more to commemorate the exhibit. Caroline’s project for me was more of a fun assignment than a real-life opportunity, but I had so much fun with it. I came up with a bunch of different designs based on some of the paintings in the show…and I still have the project as an item in my portfolio. (remember those? Artists types had actual portfolios with pieces of work they had done over the years?)

So Caroline and I had great fun with graphics and hanging the show, but that was just half of my job. I reported to the other side of the building in the afternoons where I worked with Linda Thrift to help digitize portraits of the presidents. At the time I was part of an effort to build the Catalog of American Portraits. The goal of CAP was to build a body of information about portraits of “historically important figures” in collections everywhere, public and private, using a team of researchers who would photograph, measure, and record available information on a portrait-by-portrait basis.

What this meant for my day-to-day was hours and hours of photoshop work, and I primarily digitized photos of President George Washington. The museum had staff that would get to do the fun stuff, like track down said portraits (many were well known, but many others surfaced over the years….how many portraits of George Washington are out there? Thousands).

I scanned in the physical photos of each portrait and photoshopped each image so it would be color-corrected, cropped, scaled, made to fit within the digital container of the CAP system. It wasn’t the sexiest job in the world, but I often got to put my headphones on and photoshop the afternoon away. I had great fun getting to know the others who worked on the project, one of my favorites being Warren Perry who was a wonderful excentric who brought life and color to the room. I went back to look for some email exchanges with Warren and my search uncovered this little tidbit that gives him a bit more color: “I am writing a play as part of the NPG public programming for the re-opening and it is based on Walt Whitman’s time there as a nurse.” I mean, how fun and cool is that?

All in all my time at the Smithsonian was quite short. I applied to grad school while I was working there, and narrowed down my choices to about 5 schools, only 2 of which accepted me for the fall of 2003: The Univesity of the Arts in Philadelphia, and Goldsmiths College in London. Guess which one I chose? When I learned that I could get federal loans to go to school abroad and that their grad program was about half as expensive and could be completed in just over a calendar year compared to the University of the Arts’s 2-year program, it was a fairly easy decision. And my boyfriend at the time was living in London going to the London School of Economics, so that was a point in favor of moving overseas. 

I wrapped up my time at the National Portrait Gallery by that August and was flying across the pond for the fall semester later that month. My time in DC though, really helped cement in my mind that I could do anything I wanted, and it was worth going for gold. It was worth putting in for the job I might not get, or the grad school application that might not get accepted. What if I did get the job and I was accepted? What then?

I’ve been living in the space of what is possible for years now. And it’s a good place to be. Imagine big, go big, deliver big, and you will be handsomely rewarded for your efforts. Oh, and make friends along the way. I can still touch base with many of these folks I worked with in DC all these years later and share stories and a laugh. People make all of these experiences and adventures truly come alive.

Well here I am and there was more I wanted to tell you about my DC experience…the Armond’s Pizza chapter of my life was a whole other world into itself! And then grad school…that all comes before my Pacific Crest Trail hike, in addition to the year I worked in Portland as a graphic designer…so I guess those adventures will be chronicled in other blog posts in the coming days and months. Did I know I would be writing my life story in these cancer updates to you? No, but it’s quite fun and I think I’ll continue as long as you all are enjoying it.

Are you? Should I keep going?

I think I’ll wrap it up for this installment, but not before giving you a big ‘ol gift from the Pacific Crest Trail class of 2006.

Back in the day when there weren’t that many of us ni the trail one hiker would often solicit photos from that year’s batch of hikers and put together a “class video.”. In 2006 that hiker was Pro Deal. Pro Deal (or Ryan Christensen) was a park ranger in Yosemite and a digital video guru who has brought many other excellent film projects to life (like this one called We Are Grand Canyon).

The PCT 2006 film is a doozy! Get yourself a bowl of popcorn, put on your cozy jammies, and immerse yourself in an hour and a half of hiker joy. It’s worth it!